The ground-breaking Black-Scholes-Merton model has brought about a generation of derivative pricing models that have been successfully applied in the financial industry. It has been a long standing puzzle that the structural models of credit risk, as an application of the same modeling paradigm,...

This paper investigates predictions of structural credit risk models for interest rate sensitivities of corporate bond returns. Recent evidence has shown that the existing models fail to capture this sensitivity (a stylized fact referred to as the interest rate sensitivity puzzle). We propose...

In recent years, a liquid market for options on a broad credit default swap index (CDX) has developed. We study the extent to which these options are priced consistently with options on a broad equity index (SPX). We consider a rich structural credit risk model in which firm assets follow a...

We develop a structural bond pricing approach and implement it on a large panel of US industrial bonds using an efficient maximum likelihood methodology. We evaluate the model's ability to predict yield spread levels and changes out-of-sample. Errors are smaller and distinctly less variable than...